1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a computer system, and deals more particularly with methods, systems, computer program products, and methods of doing business by using dynamic capacity-on-demand techniques for re-routing traffic in a distributed computing network.
2. Description of the Related Art
A goal of eBusiness is to maximize an enterprise's Return-On-Investment, or “ROI”. Simply building an eBusiness infrastructure does not guarantee success in the eBusiness world. A key to success is for the enterprise to effectively and efficiently utilize all of the resouces it invests for eBusiness.
Many enterprises have spent large amounts of money on hardware, software, and services in order to conduct eBusiness. Many studies have found out that Internet traffic, such as eBusiness traffic, is bursty in nature. The bursty nature makes it difficult to determine an optimum deployment of resources, where this optimum deployment ensures that (1) the deployed resources are able to satisfy the demand, and (2) the deployed resouces are fully utilized. Providing this optimum deployment is key to maximizing an enterprise's ROI: under-investment in eBusiness infrastructure could turn customers away to competitors, while on the other hand, having idle resources is a waste of investment.
One solution to this resource deployment problem is to utilize outside resources to run eBusiness applications, such as using an application hosting service or application service provider. Typically, in these types of third party arrangements, the third party manages the resources and the customer's responsibility is limited to paying a monthly fee. However, this solution has several problems. First, it does not help those enterprises which have already invested in eBusiness infrastructure (which is most existing enterprises). Second, enterprises may have concerns about relying on an application hosting service or application service provider (such as concerns regarding the third party's security, customization, and/or personalization capabilities). Third, even though some enterprises like the model of using an application hosting service or application service provider, they might still want to own their core application support resources.
Accordingly, what is needed is a way to improve ROI for an enterprise's eBusiness infrastructure by achieving higher resource utilization while still handling occasional bursts of traffic.